What sense of “dualism” do you mean, and what are the blind spots you speak of? — Pfhorrest
Rather than distinguishing between what ‘is’ and what ‘ought to be’, recognize with Putnam, Rorty and others the inseparability of fact and value, description and prescription — Joshs
Recognize that affectivity( the hedonic) is not separable from rationality but forms the core of intentional meaning. — Joshs
In general, I view the correct approach to prescriptive questions about morality and justice to be completely analogous to, but also entirely separate from, the correct approach to descriptive questions about reality and knowledge. This is different from views that hold that one set of questions reduces entirely to the other set of questions, like both scientism (which reduces prescriptive questions to descriptive ones) and constructivism (which reduces descriptive questions to prescriptive ones).
But it is also different from views such as the "non-overlapping magisteria" proposed by Stephen Jay Gould, who held that questions about reality are the domain of science, with its methodologies, while questions about morality were entirely separate in the domain of religion, with its wholly different methodologies.
I hold, like Gould, that they are entirely separate questions, but that perfectly analogous, broadly-speaking scientific, methodologies can be applied to each, and that religious methodologies have historically been (wrongly) applied to both of them as well. This is largely because of my views that prescriptive assertions and opinions are generally analogous in every way to descriptive assertions and opinions, differing only in a quality called "direction of fit". — Pfhorrest
Understand that both subjectivity and objectivity are constructed through intersubjective processes. Instead of the computer-based metaphor of the subjective agent receiving inputs from objective sense data and transforming this into behavioral output, see the organism-environment relation as a single system of of mutual transformation. — Joshs
there seems to be no engagement with phenomenological philosophy and those researchers of consciousness who have been strongly influenced by it( Zahavi, Varela and Thompson), or writers coming from the radical constructivist tradition ( Von Glasersfeld, Maturana, Piaget) or embodied enactivist perspectives( Gallagher, Fuchs). — Joshs
Instead I see formulations reminiscent of 1st generation cognitivism and representationalism — Joshs
This is similar to how my views on ontology and epistemology (see links for previous threads) entail a kind of direct realism in which there is no distinction between representations of reality and reality itself, there is only the incomplete but direct comprehension of small parts of reality that we have, distinguished from the completeness of reality itself that is always at least partially beyond our comprehension. We aren't trying to figure out what is really real from possibly-fallible representations of reality, we're undertaking a fallible process of trying to piece together our direct sensation of small bits of reality and extrapolate the rest of it from them. — Pfhorrest
with the accompanying metaphor of mind as computer ( the mind inputs i interpreted sense dat and processes into output) with a bit of ‘subjective 1st person coloration sprinkled over it — Joshs
George Berkeley famously said that "to be is to be perceived", and I don't agree with that entirely, in part because I take perception to be a narrower concept than experience in a broader sense, and because I don't think it is the actual act of being experienced per se that constitutes something's existence, but rather the potential to be experienced. I would instead say not that to be is to be perceived, or that to be is to be experienced, but that to be is to be experienceable.
And I find this adage to combine in very interesting ways with two other famous philosophical adages: Socrates said that "to do is to be", meaning that anything that does something necessarily exists; and more poignantly, Jean-Paul Sartre said that "to be is to do", meaning that what something is is defined by what that something does. Being, existence, can be reduced to the potential for or habit of some set of behaviors: things are, or at least are defined by, what they do, or at least what they tend to do. (Coupled with the association of mass to substance and energy to causation, this notion that to be is to do seems to me a vague predecessor to the notion of mass-energy equivalence).
To combine this with my adaptation of Berkeley's adage, we get concepts like "to do is to be experienced", "to be experienced is to do", "to be done unto is to experience", and "to experience is to be done unto".
This paints experience and behavior as two sides of the same coin, opposite perspectives on the same one thing: an interaction. Our experience of a thing is that thing's behavior upon us. An object is red inasmuch as it appears red, and it appears red inasmuch as it emits light toward us in certain frequencies and not others: the emission of the right frequencies of light, a behavior in a very broad sense, constitutes the property of redness. Every other property of an object is likewise defined by what it does, perhaps in response to something that we must do first: an object's color may be relative to what frequencies of light we shine on it (e.g. something that is red under white light may be black under blue light), the shape of the object as felt by touch is defined by where it pushes back on our nerves when we press them into it, and many other more subtle properties of things discovered by experiments are defined by what that thing does when we do something to it.
We can thus define all objects by their function from their experiences to their behaviors: what they do in response to what it done to them. The specifics of that function, a mathematical concept mapping inputs to outputs, defines the abstract object that is held to be responsible for the concrete experiences we have. Every object's behavior upon other objects constitutes an aspect of those other objects' experience, and every object's experience is composed of the behaviors of the rest of the world upon it. — Pfhorrest
For instance , you write “ Sensations are the raw, uninterpreted experiences, like the seeing of a color, or the hearing of a pitch.” That a classic dualistic move. — Joshs
teleology is taken to be the study of purpose in a prescriptive, moral sense, as in the ends toward which we aim our actions, the good that we seek to bring about. That is the sense in which I mean the term here. — Pfhorrest
Saying we apply morality to ourselves refers to my second my point. — Gregory
My first point was that Greek teleology leads directly to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rynlfggqAcU — Gregory
I thought his point was that we know morality from the purpose of functions. If this is true, than we would know the morality of sexuality from its function and thus the position advocated by Dr. Feser would seem to infallibly follow. — Gregory
Stoics speak of purpose and such in nature, and of us as nature. — Gregory
The Stoics with their Stoa (a word I found in Nietzsche with respect to them) are like Greek Daoists to me. They are good but they don't tell the full story. — Gregory
What I meant above about "imposing morality on ourselves" is that we seem to contain an infinity of potentiality inside us and are forced by something elsewhere inside us to impose some of these potentials on ourselves in the form of "laws". I realized this fact when I was studying Fitche. A relevant quote to this is from Hegel: " The will that is genuinely free, and contains freedom of choice sublated (canceled-while-preserved in new form) within itself, is conscious of its content as something steadfast in and for itself; and at the same time it knows the content to be utterly its own." — Gregory
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